This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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One Bagel, Two Bagel?
Rashi Fein from Boston writes: “For some years I have had a dispute with a dear friend. I say that the plural of bagel is bagel. He says that the plural of bagel is bagels. I explain my position by arguing that bagel is a Yiddish word and that ‘two bagels’ in Yiddish would be…
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September 21, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward Yom Kippur services in a hall on New York City’s Clinton Street were disrupted on account of a fight over a chair. When Joseph Rand showed up in synagogue with his family, he discovered that one Herman Garber was in one of the seats he had reserved. Rand informed…
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Red Emma in Black and White
A Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman By Sharon Rudahl New Press, 128 pages, $17.95. It should be of little surprise that Emma Goldman ended up a comic-book heroine. Now dead for nearly seven decades, Red Emma — anarchist, activist, advocate of women’s rights — is still an inspiration to the young, rebellious…
The Latest
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Whither Klezmer?
Every generation of artists faces its own peculiar set of challenges. When the first klezmer revivalists began breathing fresh life into Jewish music in the early 1970s, their task was not a simple one. They had few role models, their audience was undeveloped and many were in the position of having to learn theira instruments…
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An American Fairy Tale, With a Twist
Away By Amy Bloom Random House, 256 pages, $23.95. For Russian immigrant Lillian Leyb, calling America “the land of opportunity” seems both an understatement and a misnomer. Lillian, whose exhilarating, heartbreaking and certainly never boring story is at the heart of Amy Bloom’s vivid novel “Away,” seizes upon the microcosm of the new frontier of…
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Hostage to History
Terror in Black September: The First Eyewitness Account of the Infamous 1970 Hijackings By David Raab Palgrave Macmillan, 288 pages, $24.95. The Palestinian fedayeen who hijacked David Raab’s plane on September 6, 1970, surely thought they had hit the jackpot. Seventeen-year-old, baby-faced Raab was still so excited from his summer vacation in Israel that he…
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A Different Aria
Anne Sofie von Otter, one of the world’s greatest mezzo-sopranos, has just unveiled an unexpected, and very personal, project: a record of music by Jewish composers confined in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The Swedish opera singer first conceived of the unusual project when she sang at a forum on the Holocaust in Stockholm in the…
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Music From Her Own Mind
Look There: New and Selected Poems of Agi Mishol Translated Lisa Katz Graywolf Press, 112 pages, $14.00. Agi Mishol is a major minor poet, the kind with whom, as John Crowe Ransom said, “the poetic object is elected by a free choice… and this object, deliberately elected and carefully worked up by the adult poet,…
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At-one-ment
‘Atonement” is an English word to which I had never given much thought. In fact, I had thought about it so little that I had always assumed that the possibility of reading it as “at-one-ment” was merely a kind of pun having nothing to do with its original meaning. It’s embarrassing to find out, therefore,…
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Yid Vid: A Great Miracle Happened One Year Ago Today
Today marks the first anniversary of a pivotal moment in Jewish history: Here’s a report from last year on this momentous occasion: Boston’s North Shore reclaimed the world record for largest shofar ensemble Sept. 17 when 798 participants sounded the shofar for 7 minutes, 50 seconds, on Phillips Beach in Swampscott, Mass. The Great Shofar…
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September 14, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward The Forward has learned of a planned attack on any and all progressive Jews by hooligans and criminals. The attack is scheduled for Yom Kippur, when many freethinking Jews meet in their clubhouses for nonreligious holiday events. Similar attacks occurred last year, though word on the street now is…
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